One consistent comment I see in this thread is that the new Mac Pro is for professional Hollywood filmmakers. Well, for colourists, compositing, audio for sure. However for picture editing, which is probably what most non-industry people think of, it really isn't the solution, at least for film and television editing. We actually work with proxy (low data rate, high compression) files when doing our offline edits. Given that the camera source media can be in the 10s if not 100s of TB of data and data rates starting at >400Mb/s it is easier to transcode everything to a smaller file for the edit and then conform to the camera source or other high quality format for finishing. A decade or more ago you still needed a pretty powerful machine to do this work but now, well, not so much. For offline editing (when all of the picture decisions are being made) an iMac with a second monitor and I/O device (if going to television) is often a better solution than the old (or new) tower. On the television series I worked on for 9 years we replaced the 2006-2009 Mac Pros with iMacs when it became time and the editors fought over who got to use the new iMacs because they were so much more capable (poor assistant editors got the trickle-down machines and in season 13 were still using the remaining 2009 MacPros). For what it's worth when the series first started shooting they shot super16 film, edited from DVCam SD 29.97 transfers and needed to run everything through Cinema Tools (originally cut in legacy FCP, still my favourite NLE overall). I do not miss those cadence tracking, pulldown days one bit.
Curiously, it is the corporate video makers who are often working in the latest formats with the camera source files who would actually benefit most from these machines as far as day-to-day editing goes. They often need the horsepower to push far greater files than anything I do in proxy. With ProRes RAW
finally gaining some traction as a standard the Afterburner addition will probably prove very valuable to some users. However, I do not see ProRes RAW becoming a proxy standard in film or television any time soon, it is still too big for 100+ hours of footage.
The biggest hurdle to quick adoption of the new Mac Pros into the film industry at large is Catalina. It simply
is not supported by AVID Media Composer or Pro Tools, the standards in North America still (for now, which I have been saying for 20 years). Past experience has shown we might still be 6 months away from Catalina support though, who knows, maybe AVID will surprise us and announce support tomorrow with the release of the Mac Pros. I wouldn't take a bet on it, though.
So, though I can imagine a great many use cases in the broader sense of filmmaking for these new Mac Pros which will allow some pretty amazing work to happen I know I won't be seeing one in an edit bay any time soon. Which is okay, the Mac tools currently available are more than sufficient for the work I do.
Oh, and one final comment on all the PC switching, DIY fans out there. In 20+ years I have been editing I have been asked to work on a PC once. It was a Franken-computer assembled by a gamer as having all of the bells-and-whistles necessary for editing 4K: 12-core Intel; 128GB RAM; 2x Nvidia 1080 Ti video cards; they dropped almost $12K Cdn on the build with monitors (2 years ago). Alas, there were driver issues, architecture issues, and my 2016 MBP was a faster option for editing 4K, even in Premiere Pro (only time in my career I have been asked to use PP as well). Curiously it was a Mac facility that was convinced they need to build the PC to work in 4K. Nobody wanted to use the machine, though, because of all of the problems, which is why I, as a contractor, got stuck with it. Now, your experience may vary but for all of those claiming that the Pros have abandoned the Mac that simply has not been my experience and for good reason.
